Flight Before the Wrights

Flight Before The Wrights Could man have known the secrets of flight thousands of years before the Wright brothers?

Scale models of airplanes have been found which predate by thousands of years the time of the Wright Brothers.

Pre-Columbian artifacts In 1954, a collection of pre-Columbian gold artifacts were sent by the Columbian government on a tour to the United States . Among these were gold artifacts, around 5 centimeters long, resembling modern delta wing aircrafts.

Some have attempted to dismiss the object’s shape as resembling a bird, but straight-edged, delta shaped front wings, a cockpit, and vertical and horizontal stabilizers are not how the body of birds are designed with.

Pre-Columbian gold artifact, which some researchers say resemble a bird or an insect. Others are intrigued by its uncanny resemblance to a modern day airplane.

In 1996, a 16:1 model of one of the artifacts was successfully flown by three German engineers: Algund Enboom, Peter Belting, Conrad Lubers.

The Abydos Frieze On a 8m high roof beam, in one of Egypt’s oldest temples, the Temple of Osiris at Abydos, are hieroglyphs which resemble a helicopter, a battle tank, an airship, a glider, adjacent to one another.

“There was a lot of rubble at my feet, and it looked to me like it had fallen off, and incised in the stone itself of this oldest temple along the Nile, were these figures. I think they are ancient technology,” says Egyptologist Dr. Ruth Hover, speaking on her discovery of the glyphs.

Heiroglphs at one of the Oldest Temples in Egypt, which some say resemble airplanes and a battle a tank. Skeptics say these were formed by chance as the plaster eroded away.

Some contend these are glyphs accidentally created when plaster fell off exposing parts of more ancient hieroglyphs on the undersurface. Others contend they are complete glyphs, clearly incised on the stone, revealed when the newer plaster fell off.

The Sakkara Glider Perhaps not as intriguing as a 3000 year old hieroglyph depicting a helicopter, complete with rotor blades and vertical stabilizers – but the artifact’s aerodynamic precision, vertical tail, and airplane like wings have captured the attention of many researchers.

Simon Sanderson, an aerodynamics expert, subjected a scale model of the Sakkara glider to a series of flight test at one of the world’s leading aeronautics The aerodynamic properties of the “Sakkara Glider” has been investigated by experts. institute at Manchester, England. In a high-tech wind tunnel, the flight characteristics of a 5 times larger model of the artifact was studied.

Around 14.2 centimeters long and 18.3 centimeters wide, the wooden artifact, dates to about 200 B.C., and was discovered in a tomb near Saqqara in 1898. On the right side of the artifact is painted an eye and a beak.

Sanderson’s team found that lacking a tail wing, the artifact proved too unstable to have been the model of a glider. But, at the rear of the ancient wooden carving, a segment was seen broken away, where a horizontal wing might have fitted.

The researchers added on a tail wing at the location suggested by the chipping on the wood, and restudied the flight characteristics of the artifact. With a tail wing, the Sakkara glider flew effortlessly in the simulated flights.

The humming bird glyph at Nazca.

The Nazca Lines High on an arid plateau that stretches, on an area spanning nearly 500 square kilometers, between the towns of Nazca and Palpa in South America, are thousands of strange glyphs – stylized hummingbirds, sharks, llamas, human-like forms, and geometrical shapes.

The larger of these figures are over 200 meters across. Seen from level ground, they appear as mere lines; the drawings become apparent only when seen from a height, as from an airplane. Some of these lines extend straight for several kilometers.

Who made them, or for what purpose, is still unknown.

Ancient Writings An ancient Indian book on architecture, the “Samarangana Sutradhara,” dated to around 1050 A.D., describes in detail a kind of aerial-car called “vimana.” “Strong and durable must the machine's body be made of light material, having wings joined smoothly with invisible seams. It can carry passengers, it can be made small and compact, it can move in silence,” the classical Indian work says.

A Nazca figure, popularly referred to as the “astronaut.”

An excerpt from this book, describing the machine’s propulsion, as translated by author and anthropologist R. Cedric Leonard, says: "At the critical time the beam of fire must be released, which will make the action possible. The time-beam expands, accompanied by the thunder of the expanding medium. This desired expansion performs work like an elephant in an endless cycle."

References to Vimanas abound in ancient Indian legends which attribute the technology to ancient civilizations, which were completely destroyed in periodic catastrophes. A Jain text compiled, in the 8th century A.D., the “Mahavira of Bhavabhuti,” speaks of an ancient cycle of civilization, a time when the sky “was full of stupendous flying-machines, dark as night, but picked out by lights with a yellowish glare."

Even stranger are stories in Indian traditions speaking of those who visited other worlds and returned in a few days, to find thousands of years had passed on earth. This kind of time-dilation, according to special-relativity, occurs with high-speed travel.

Similar legends and accounts of flying machines, even of interplanetary travel, are found in cultures ranging from the Chinese and the Mayan and to primitive tribes in Africa.

Cave paintings Cave paintings from Italy to the Tassili Mountains in Sahara show images of what appear to be humanoids in space suits.

Paintings from Val Camonica, Italy, dated to around 10,000 BC.

Popol Vuh, a Mayan manuscript, states: "Men came from the stars, knowing everything, and they examined the four corners of the sky and the Earth's round surface."

The Chilam Baalam, a collection of Mayan manuscripts, compiled in the 18th and 19th century A.D. speaks of beings who “descended from the sky in flying vessels...white men in flying rings, who can touch the sky."

To mainstream science and anthropology, the shape of these artifacts could only be mere products of chance, and the ancient writings and paintings mere figments of imagination. Ancient Indian and Mayan traditions would give another explanation for a lot of these artifacts – human civilization runs in cycles, reaches technological peaks, and meet with catastrophes which completely wipe them out. Then, a cycle starts anew.

Rock painting in the Tassili Mountains, dated to around 6000 B.C.